Thursday

A fairly quiet day for us; we are not in the Finals. (We end up in 4th place; not too shabby, but not as good as last year.) So at last I'm able to have a good look around!

Have a look upstairs, where the Junior section is. Rather dismayed to find that the security up there is quite strict, and I'm not allowed to get too close to the robots that the Juniors (i.e., teenagers and younger) have created; apparently they don't want any of their `mentors' giving them too much help. Personally I think that's a great pity; I've always got a real buzz from seeing what the youngsters have managed to come up with.
Also up there are the `middle-sized' wheeled robots (in the `Major' section). Despite the name these are quite large - dustbin sized - and amazing pieces of engineering, capable of performing chip shots over the heads of other robots towards goals. Can't help thinking that they're an evolutionary dead-end though...

Back downstairs and the final competitions are underway. The Standard Platform League competition uses a common commercial robot called the NAO - the type the little girls were talking to yesterday. People who don't understand how difficult it is to get a legged robot to move - let alone play football - are often underwhelmed by how these little white robots are moving, but I'm impressed on how fast the progress is with them. Nonetheless, they do spend quit a bit of time on their backs. Meanwhile Jie has been running the 3D simulated football competition, which runs with simulated NAOs. The idea is that the simulation people can focus on building up strategies, while the real robot people sort out the engineering aspects. Jie is quite chuffed when Team Apollo clinch the first prize; he was with that team before he came to Oxford.

Over at the Robot Rescue arena the big rescue robots are going through their paces. Again there has been considerable progress with the design and implementation of these over the last couple of years. The vehicles tend to be variations on a design which has a number of tracks on the bottom for scrambling over stuff, and a set of cameras on a robot arm on the top. The robots are controlled by an operator who only sees what the cameras show him (or her), plus the output of a laser range-finder. They are certainly making quite a lot of noise as they crash around the arena - and they are managing to get around and over the 'rubble' (actually blocks of wood) that have been laid out to try to slow them down. When they get to where they have to go, the robot arm come out, and they get a nice picture or two of the 'victims'.

The thing that is really striking this year are the Home Robots. There are many contenders here for this competition, some looking downright weird. Again there is a basic form for the robots that most adhere to; a tracked or wheeled robot base to move the thing around, with a post coming out to hold a robot head and two arms at a height so that the robot can `look' at faces. They use voice recognition for commands and a laser range-finder to accurately measure distances, and their arms to do useful stuff. During the competition each robot is introduced into a `home scene' containing some humans to serve and is given some task to do; marks are given for speed of operation, and for `effectiveness' (which is a rather difficult thing to quantify). The competition are held in an environment which is vaguely split into a number of `rooms' (e.g., bedroom; kitchen), and with a number of pieces of furniture that an army of human helpers change around at regular intervals. What is certainly missing are changes in level; I guess that that's reasonable, as they want to focus on how to operate robots in a home environment, rather than on legged locomotion.

The finalists in the home robot competition at least don't look too scary. The Gadget Show - a very popular UK TV show - are there filming, with one of the hosts (Jon Bentley) acting as one of the judges (below). He seems particularly puzzled by why the robot builders are proud of their robot's face recognition technology. (I guess that it's a technology that has rapidly moved into consumer programs like iTunes, while the roboticists have focused on getting the rest of their robot to work.) Most of the robots manage to get a bottle of beer out of a fridge - possibly with a little help from their minders - and place it on a table. One of the most striking of the robots reminds be of the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz; colourful and friendly looking, with a habit of fixing its gaze on whoever is speaking. These little touches may seem peculiar, but are thought to be the sort of mannerisms that will be required before we accept robots as our `friends'.